Learning Representations for Real-world Recognition

Methods for visual recognition have made dramatic strides in recent years on various online benchmarks, but performance in the real world still often falters. Classic gradient-histogram models make overly simplistic assumptions regarding image appearance statistics, both locally and globally. Recent progress suggests that new learning-based representations can improve recognition by devices that are embedded in a physical world.

I'll review new methods for domain adaptation which capture the visual domain shift between environments, and improve recognition of objects in specific places when trained from generic online sources. I'll discuss methods for cross-modal semi-supervised learning, which can leverage additional unlabeled modalities in a test environment.

Finally as time permits I'll present recent results learning hierarchical local image representations based on recursive probabilistic topic models, on learning strong object color models from sets of uncalibrated views using a new multi-view color constancy paradigm, and/or on recent results on monocular estimation of grasp affordances.